Learning to trust again: Rwanda’s “Women in Dialogue”

Beatrice Uzanyabariyo once lived in a world where a person’s ethnicity did not matter.

A 43-year-old farmer, Uzanya-bariyo recalls a time in rural, northwestern Rwanda when most people didn’t care whether someone belonged to the Hutu ethnic majority or the Tutsi ethnic minority.

Uzanyabariyo grew up in a Tutsi family, got married to a Hutu man at the age of 20, and raised eight children.

“We were living in peace,” she says. “. . . I am Tutsi, but my husband was a Hutu, and there was no problem.”

Beatrice Uzanyabariyo (left) and another member of “Women in Dialogue”

But in 1994, Rwanda convulsed in an enormous ethnic conflict. An extremist political movement called Hutu Power mobilized tens of thousands of Hutus to kill the country’s Tutsis, as well as any Hutus that stood in their way.

This genocide claimed nearly a million lives in 100 days of killing throughout the country and caused incalculable suffering to those who survived. For Uzanyabariyo, the pain of that time will never be gone, but she is doing all she can to find healing.

Uzanyabariyo is a member of a group called Women in Dialogue, in which people from different sides of the Rwandan conflict work together on agricultural projects and discuss ways to move beyond the violence of the past.

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) supports the activities of Women in Dialogue, which has about 90 members in three locations. These Women in Dialogue groups are supported and trained in peacemaking by Peace House, an MCC partner organization that is a ministry of Rwandan Evangelical Friends churches.

MCC supports Peace House with about $60,000 Cdn. Additionally, an MCC worker, Joshua Bazuin, of Mount Hope, Ont., serves with Peace House.

When the genocide began in 1994, local Hutu extremists set up roadblocks in Ruhengeri and went from house to house to seize people to be executed.

Uzanyabariyo was with her Tutsi family when these militants came for her father and brother.

“They took them to the roadblock and they killed them,” she says. “We all ran away then, and they came to kill my brother’s four children.”

With the help of her husband’s family, Uzanyabariyo and her children hid in the forest for three months.

“Sometimes it was in a pit covered by branches,” she says. “The people in the house, my husband’s family, came and brought food at night.”

Uzanyabariyo says she began to hate all Hutus, except for her husband and in-laws. After the genocide ended – when predominantly Tutsi rebel forces took over the country – Uzanyabariyo was consumed by anger. She says she spent weeks without speaking to anyone.

Through Women in Dialogue, Uzanyabariyo says she has let go of her anger. She now leads a team of women from the group who sell cassava flour to earn money to buy soap and salt for themselves.

Many members of the group have lost loved ones, some to the genocide and others to violence that occurred afterward. They include Tutsis and Hutus, and many are either widows or have husbands in prison for genocide crimes. Several men who have served prison time and have been released are also members.

In the process of working and talking together, former enemies are often learning to trust each other as neighbours again.

“If you have needs, your neighbour can help,” Uzanyabariyo says. “And when you’re working together, it’s really good.”

She says, “Because we have received workshops, which base their teaching on the Word of God, and we have seen that having hate in Rwanda is no solution, we decided to be together to build a new Rwanda.”

Tim Shenk is a writer for MCC communications.